Fellow astronomers,
it's a huge honour for me to receive the Berenice Page Medal for 2008
and quite humbling to follow names like Bradfield and Evans
whose achievements were inspirational to a generation of amateur astronomers.
They set the bar as high as it could go.
Making all those comet and supernova discoveries
must have involved a tremendous amount of perseverance.
It's been like that for me in the minor planet field too.
Most dark winter nights, I'm observing way past midnight,
eyes propped open with matchsticks,
on the hunt for the next new member of the Solar System.
I've been doing that since 1997 when I built an observatory at Reedy Creek,
having realized it wasn't too difficult for amateurs to discover main-belt asteroids.
But after the first hundred discoveries,
the focus shifted toward a goal of finding objects of a more exotic kind.
Little did I know that it would take nearly 7 years
before I was to make my first really important find.
It came about after I built a robotic half-metre telescope
to use with a CCD camera provided by the Planetary Society.
It was a risky venture;
I didn't know if I could make the primary mirror and the custom focal reducer
or that threaded rod drives would be anywhere near accurate enough for CCD imaging.
However that gamble paid off in a big way
the day after I began regular operations with the new telescope,
when in April, 2004, I picked up a large potentially hazardous asteroid.
It's very satisfying to have built something
that brought into focus such an important find.
By 2005 the survey procedure evolved to include the detection of distant objects.
I was dead keen to blanket the southern sky in a search for a trans-neptunian planet.
8000 square degrees of coverage and 18 months later I didn't have a planet
but the near-earth asteroids and comets I did find were well worth all the effort.
One never knows when the next eurika moment will come.
That's what drives all this activity.
The other thing I'm known for
is developing the field of drift-scan timing of asteroid occultations.
I take a CCD star trail image during an occultation
and extract timings accurately linked to a time base.
It's a technique that produced 27 of 29 positive events observed at Reedy Creek
which I think is a record number for any observatory,
whatever the method of observation.
I'd like to see more Australian observers record asteroid occultations that way,
other than just myself!
Timing occultations is one branch of astronomy
not generally able to be done by professionals.
so lets forget about taking the gazillionth image of the Orion Nebula
and do real science instead.
Getting back to the Page medal, I want to thank the ASA
for providing a national award for non-professional astronomers.
I also thank Dave Herald, David Higgins and Stephen Russell for nominating me
and the panel of judges for making their decision.
I hope the convention is a great success, sorry I couldn't make it in person.
Cheers one an all!